


Hell Is

by satyreyes



Category: Mystery Science Theater 3000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-29
Updated: 2016-11-29
Packaged: 2018-09-02 23:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8687680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/satyreyes/pseuds/satyreyes
Summary: It takes a lifetime to build a reputation, and only a moment to wreck it.  But Dr. Forrester may yet find interesting things in the rubble.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mm8](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mm8/gifts).



Forrester's hand convulsed, and he dropped his sewing needle on the ground for the umpteenth time that day. “Bah,” he said. The word echoed in the cavernous surroundings of the place that had been his home for far too long. As he bent to retrieve the needle, his gaze fell on his only colleague – the madman who outranked him – and he felt the ire begin to rise inside him again.

“Did I tell you how I wound up here?” Forrester asked, half angrily, half plaintively.

“Yes,” answered the other man. “Several times.”

“It all started the night before the Invention Exchange,” Forrester said. “Oh, stop sighing and listen to me.”

\- - -

In Forrester's career he had achieved much to be proud of, and the symbol of that pride had been his corner office, filled with the accoutrements due a tenured researcher of Gizmonic Institute. Every Monday morning Forrester had fastidiously aligned the miniature gold-plated orrery on his desk, rotating the complex interlocking discs until the Earth was where it ought to be. Every Wednesday during lunch he had shut the curtains of his small third-floor window, carefully unmounted his wall shelf of inventions to create an empty space, and indulged himself in an old movie projected in living color (or, more often, in black and white) between the bookcase and the microfiche machine. But his memory now was drawn irresistibly to the workbench, where he had been straining his endurance the night Joel stepped into his office. The last night it would be his office.

The machine on the workbench was a labor of love – literally. It looked like a two-foot-long hypodermic needle with LED lights running down the sides, except for the large suction cup around the tip. The cup was meant to attach to the chest in front of the user's sternum using a gentle vacuum, so that on command, the needle could inject a powerful combination of steroids to simulate the rush of romantic attraction – without the mess that came with an actual romantic partner. The first problem was that the device still needed miniaturization, but was all right; that could come after tomorrow's Invention Exchange. The second problem was that the suction cup's “gentle vacuum” currently tended to vacuum the user's heart out of their chest, as more than one of Gizmonic's uncannily realistic test dummies could attest. That was less all right. Forrester could already see the indulgent smile of Dr. Noyes, vice-president of R&D, when she heard him explain that, no, really, his invention was very clever, it just killed one hundred percent of its users. His genius would go unrecognized at the Invention Exchange yet again, unless he could work a miracle over one last late night. Even that might not matter in the end, of course. Every week it seemed the entire department showered all its attention onto –

“How are you tonight, sir?” came a voice from behind him. That voice. Deadpan, complacent, smug. Forrester rounded on the janitor, and looked into the eyes of the blue-collar, GED-holding good-for-nothing who had somehow wound up swimming in his betters' accolades at every single Invention Exchange for the last two months.

“Good evening, Joel,” said Forrester, with forced cheerfulness. “I'd love my office cleaned tonight, but it so happens that I'm hard at work right now, prototyping inventions that will shape the future of the human race. I'm brain-deep in quantum electrodynamics and applied thoracic anatomy, and I'm afraid you'd only be a distraction with your broom, and your mop, and your – what is that, exactly?” Forrester waved a hand at the gadget-shaped pile of tubes and hoses at Joel's feet. It looked like a vacuum cleaner designed by a Cthulhu aficionado.

“This?” shrugged Joel, with what was certainly exaggerated indifference. “This is just something I whipped up in the lab earlier. It blows all the dust in your office into one big dust bunny so that I can sweep it all up at once. See, watch...”

Forrester didn't have time to protest. Joel kicked a switch and the machine came to life, foot-long tentacles flailing, emitting a ululating whine that made Forrester reflexively cover his ears – which meant, however, that he had no hands left to cover his hair or mustache, which were thrown in every direction by the rush of wind bouncing off every surface in his office. It took several wild heartbeats before Forrester heard the machine whir to a halt, its tentacles settling down on the floor with a distinct air of menace.

“There,” said Joel. “Your office is all dusted now, though I don't actually see the dust bunny anywhere...”

Forrester reached a hand into the sparse, knotty bush that now passed for his hair. It emerged with a ball of dust as large as his fist.

“Let me just take that from you,” said Joel, as Forrester locked his baleful gaze onto him. “No need to thank me. I wasn't actually here to clean your office, I just wanted to say good luck tomorrow. You're working very late, and I know the whole department can't wait to see what you come up with. Are you all right, sir?”

Oh, it was almost as though Robinson thought he was too good to be a janitor. And now he was walking around salting the wounds of actual scientists – scientists with tenure, in fact. It had been intolerable – still was intolerable. But Forrester prided himself on intellectual honesty, and he had to admit that his present situation was not entirely Joel's fault. No, he had made a bad decision walking out of the lab later that night. He had passed through the hall of inventions, each covered in a white sheet in readiness for tomorrow's presentations, and in a moment of weakness he had gathered up each bundle and swapped his invention with Joel's.

\- - -

The next part was hard to think about. Maybe the hardest part was remembering how he had almost saved himself – how in the morning, as the conference room seethed with anticipation, he had actually walked up to Joel and told him that he needed to switch their nameplates. “Oh, that's very nice of you, Mr. Forrester, but I'm proud of what I made, and I know you're proud of what you made, so let's both show them what we made, okay?” Idiot. Buffoon. To say nothing of Joel.

And then, whipping the sheet off. Expecting to see the tentacle vacuum. Instead seeing a gerbil, dead in its exercise wheel, enclosed in a plastic globe mounted to a battery the size of a large dog, from which emerged a long jumpsuit-red wire ending in a joy buzzer. A monitor on the side of the battery read “FULL” in cheerful green letters.

Forrester had been at a loss, had for a moment considered telling his audience of a half-dozen researchers that his invention didn't work and they should go look at someone else's project. But they were oohing and aahing. Researchers from other groups were breaking off to see what the big deal was, and for once it was him. And one of them was Dr. Noyes.

He did the only thing that seemed reasonable: he opened the plastic globe by its airhole, tenderly removed the gerbil – how could Robinson kill this poor creature? – and readied the joy buzzer above its body. He looked around, for dramatic effect. Met Dr. Noyes' eyes. And applied the joy buzzer to the gerbil.

For a moment, as lightning bright as the sun arced down the wire to the gerbil, he had actually felt exultant. Yes, the neurons of his right arm were being rewritten by the electrical overload, and yes, his hair was standing so straight he was amazed it didn't fly off his head entirely, but what a rush! Caught in the current, the gerbil twitched as though alive. And then the current was off, and the gerbil twitched again. And again. And then it was running around the table.

There were no oohs or aahs now.

“Er,” began Forrester. “Witness, um. Witness the triumph of genius over death! With this device I have shattered the fragile frontier that divides Earth from Hades! I have obliterated the final distinction between Man and God! Witness the Galatea, and the end of the age of mortals!”

Dr. Noyes strode up to Forrester, her measured footfalls deafening in the stillness of the hall. Though she was half a foot shorter than Forrester, he felt, as always, that she towered over him.

“This invention,” she said, her gaze leveled directly at his furtive eyes. “It is yours?”

He could lie. And who could stop him? Joel? No one would believe the janitor's word over Forrester's. History hung within his reach. It was not meant for the likes of Joel.

“Oh, yes,” said Forrester. “Certainly.”

For a moment more, her eyes pierced his. Evaluating. He returned her stare evenly, willing her to accept his words, to accept him. And at last, she nodded once, slowly. She believes me.

Then Noyes turned on her heel and addressed the uniformed security guards – who, Forrester belatedly noticed, were standing at attention. “Deep-six him,” she said.

And for the second time in as many minutes, all hell broke loose.

\- - -

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that hell is other people. He wasn't wrong about that; Forrester often felt certain he could be happy if not for other people and their inconvenient expectations. But more to the point, hell, in this case, was Deep 6.

Forrester had only ever seen one man get deep-sixed. “It's where they send you when you're too crazy to go on working, but they can't fire you because you have tenure,” a coworker had whispered to him at the time. The idea of the place had haunted Forrester ever since: a prison, he imagined, six subbasements below the surface of the earth, with manacles on the moldy stone walls, the silence of the grave broken only by the squeals of rodents and the hollow dripping of water somewhere in the far distance. This image was, Forrester knew, utterly implausible. But he couldn't shake it from his mind as he took the elevator down, down, down, his arms full of the contents of what had been his office, Joel's accursed joy buzzer sitting uselessly on the floor next to him. It seemed an eternity, and yet still not long enough, before the elevator doors opened onto Deep 6. The lights were off, and Forrester stepped off the elevator uneasily, half expecting the floor to open up underneath him.

“There's no call button,” said a voice at his ear. Forrester jumped and fell sideways, landing hard on – seriously? – the stone floor. “We go up and down,” the voice continued as though uninterrupted, “by the emergency exit. The hatch is behind the building. You'll never be inside the Institute proper again. It's _wretched_.”

Forrester squinted up at the voice's source, a pudgy, bespectacled face with bushy hair like a Muppet's. He knew this man: he was the scientist Forrester had seen deep-sixed, for some experiment involving... 

“Aren't you the creep who tried to teach monkeys to garden in space?” sneered Forrester, pulling himself to a stand.

“Now, that's harsh,” replied the other man. “The monkeys had grown some fine space posies before Noyes found out how I was spending company resources and stuck me down here. I'll never see my monkeys again.”

Great. From having his own office to being confined to Deep 6 with a total nutjob. A nutjob who, technically, had seniority over Forrester. This would not do. Unfair as it was, Forrester would work twice as hard, produce three times as many inventions, until he won back the respect of his colleagues.

\- - -

“And it wasn't even my invention!” concluded Forrester indignantly. “It was that dunce Robinson's. And they say I'm the one who's mad!”

He looked at Dr. Erhardt for affirmation. Erhardt nodded indulgently, just as he had the first fifteen times he had heard this story. “You deserved their respect,” he commiserated. “Just like you said.”

Forrester had spent months, now, in Deep 6. How many months he didn't know: he rarely emerged. He slept on a cot he had assembled from surgical bandages and cotton, so that he didn't lose a moment of work to commuting. Frankly, his one-bedroom condominium had never meant much to him anyway. He had, as he'd promised himself, pushed himself harder than ever before. Invention upon invention lay piled upon the shelves and counters and workbench of Forrester's makeshift cubicle, all erected from other researchers' leavings that got dumped into this otherwise barren basement through a chute in the ceiling. Fat lot of good it had done him: he'd had no opportunity to even show his work to his haughty higher-ups. Even Joel had never visited him down here. Not, Forrester supposed, that he could blame him.

“Bah,” said Forrester, already turning back to his test dummies. Dolls, Erhardt had called them – but just because a monkey-obsessed loon like Erhardt couldn't see the value of sorting through used dummy parts, mixing and matching and reconfiguring them, trying to create something pristine, didn't mean Forrester was crazy. It just meant that Erhardt, like everyone else, was an idiot. No, thought Forrester charitably: it wasn't that Erhardt was an idiot, it was just that Forrester was eons ahead of his time. No one could be expected to understand what Forrester was trying to achieve. Truth be told, even Forrester didn't know.

And so he returned to his work with the dummies, which occupied him whenever he was between inventions, stitching and unstitching, the needle shaking in his tired fingers, seeking something that lay between warp and weft. He would know it when he found it.

\- - -

Forrester's work was very important, and he had no time for fripperies like eating. When his hunger became too much to ignore, he would find some leavings from the ceiling chute and stuff them down his throat. But once in a while there was nothing even remotely edible, and Dr. Erhardt had nothing to share. Those nights, Forrester would gather up his latest project into a lopsided duffel bag, climb the six flights of stairs to the surface, and visit the only restaurant within walking distance of Gizmonic Institute. Well, “restaurant.”

“Welcome to Arby's,” read the crinkled paper that held Forrester's squashed turkey sandwich together. Forrester stared dully at the ostensible food for the third straight hour. Even in his current half-starved state, Forrester could not find it appetizing. His thoughts went off in other directions entirely, circling what was left of his self-esteem like vultures. Who was he fooling? He had tampered with the forces of life and death, then cackled about his genius like some sort of grandiose would-be Prometheus – only considerably balder, and without a Titan's larger-than-life charisma to back him up. He would never win back the respect of his colleagues, no matter what he did now, even if someone would hear him out.

“I brought you some more root beer, sir,” said the busser, interrupting his train of thought.

Forrester glowered. “You are a busboy at Arby's,” he said. “You're nearly in your thirties and you've made nothing of your life; you're an embarrassment to your parents and to any friends you might miraculously have. Your superiors are abusive, and even the people who pick up the garbage look down on you. How do you live with yourself?”

The portly busboy looked down at the ground. 

“Speak!” demanded Forrester.

“I don't kid myself, man,” said the busser. “I know I'm no good. I don't even have parents to disappoint anymore. I just figure – well, if all I can do is refill someone's drink, I'm making someone's life better, even if just a little bit. And if I come to work every day, even though no one's gonna say thank you, and if I keep doing my job, then maybe it all adds up to something. I hope so, anyway. Can... can I get you anything else?”

Forrester shook his head. His eyes glued themselves to the busser's retreating backside as his mind whirred. Here was a man lower in station than even himself, who by rights should be crippled by despair. Yet he found meaning in the work he did, in serving people who would never appreciate him. Here, without a doubt, was a man Forrester could learn from emulating.

Alternatively...

Forrester looked down at his unzipped duffel bag. Inside was his invention, his real invention, from months ago, the one with the suction cup. In all this time, he had never gotten it working. He had planned to fix that tonight.

With one hand, Forrester hefted the suction cup. With the other, he held the large, heavy hypodermic needle like a club. The busboy, sniffling, shuffled out of the building for a break, into the dark, solitary night. Forrester quietly followed.

\- - -

By the time Forrester had completed his mad dash back to Gizmonic, his heart was pounding, and the one in the suction chamber was not. He took the stairs down two at a time, slowing only when he lost his balance and his prize nearly toppled out of its housing. When he reached the Deep 6 landing, he kicked open the door and fairly flung himself into his cubicle.

Dr. Erhardt was gone for the day. Good; that meant fewer questions. Forrester placed his test dummy on the workbench and, willing his hands not to tremble, undid its stitching. Hurried though he was, he couldn't help admiring the dummy again. Forrester had knitted its trusting baby face to a thick gray wig, one lock curling over the forehead like an unanswered question. Its neck he had stitched to a gorgeous, substantial body, which he had filled with the best exemplars of simulated organs he could find among the detritus from the upper floors. The only thing it was missing was a heart. No good hearts ever came down the chute; perhaps other researchers were as prone to ruin them as Forrester had been. No matter. He had one now.

Forrester inserted the stolen heart into the dummy's chest cavity, wiring it to the appropriate polypropylene veins and arteries, and before he did up the stitching, he forced his impatient brain to recheck every organ. _Everything has to be perfect, Clayton. You won't get another chance._ But everything was perfect. He redid the seams.

Now he reached for the Galatea. He had figured out how Joel's machine worked. You charged the battery by spinning the gerbil wheel, then discharged it with the electrode disguised as a joy buzzer. Absurdly simple, really. With his fingers he spun the wheel, watching as the battery's progress bar climbed, achingly slowly, towards full. And then it was full. As if in a dream, Forrester picked up the joy buzzer and turned towards the dummy.

\- - -

The first thing the dummy knew was light: light behind the closed lids of its eyes, light flickering along its neurons, from chamber to chamber of its heart. The next thing was cold: cold damp air around it, cold metal table beneath it. The light and the cold were exhausting. The next thing was sleep.

\- - -

At length, there were sounds.

_“Really, Erhardt, I don't see why you should be so upset. It's just a straightforward application of my existing technologies.”_

_“I'm not upset by the technology, Clayton. On the contrary, I'm intrigued. But you brought it to life, my dear colleague. It's a creation, like a baby. Don't you understand what that means?”_

_“Of course I understand! It means I'm not the biggest abomination in Deep 6 anymore. This new life is the monster now, and he'll bear any burden gladly.”_

_“You brought it to life so you could feel superior to someone?”_

_“So what if I did? The point is, he's here now, so you might as well get used to him.”_

_“Well, maybe I will. But the doll is your problem. I'll leave you and your psychosis to pick up after your ugly, misconceived Frankenstein. Enjoy!”_

\- - -

“Frank,” commanded Forrester, “hand me the welder, would you?”

The monster obeyed his creator, as he always did. “Yes, sir, Dr. Forrester.”

“Frank, you nimrod,” said Forrester with relish. “This is a shielded metal welder. Does it look to you like it's going to fuse these thin plates together?”

Frank's brow wrinkled into a tight knot as he tried to guess the answer his master expected. “No, Dr. Forrester?”

“Of course not! Obviously what I need is the Heliarc welder. Hand me that one.”

Oh, yes, Forrester was enjoying. In point of fact, he'd never been happier, not even on the day he'd received tenure. For the first time, he didn't have to care about anyone's expectations or needs but his own. The Frankenstein looked human – he looked like a gorgeous human, actually – but he wasn't, not really; he didn't count. And if Erhardt gave him the side-eye every once in a while, well, so what? After all, if Erhardt was so smart, why didn't he have his own personal servant? Hell was other people, and other people weren't Forrester's problem, not anymore.

“Frank, you mangy sloth, quit napping and get me some coffee.”

“Frank, I have wonderful news: the skunk ray is ready, and you get to be the first test subject.”

“Frank, I need to refresh myself on the anatomy of the lymphatic system. Get on the table.”

Deep 6 wasn't a prison, Forrester realized now. It was quite the contrary, a paradise where he was permitted to pursue his super vision without supervision. He didn't need respect, not when he had obedience; didn't need peers, not when he had subordinates. Frank worked under him, and he worked Frank over. It just went to show that sometimes everything turned out all right after all.

\- - -

Then of course Joel showed up to ruin everything.

It was late in the evening – or at least, Forrester had just been nodding off to sleep; he hadn't been outside in the days since he'd created his monster, so he wasn't sure what time it was. Frank was sleeping at the foot of Forrester's cot, which had been upgraded into a real bed with a nice wooden frame thanks to Frank's unstinting labor. At first Forrester hadn't recognized the dinging sound for what it was; the elevator hadn't arrived at Deep 6 since Forrester had. But when he heard the elevator doors slide open, he jolted awake.

“Dr. Forrester, sir?” called Joel.

Forrester kicked Frank awake as he called back. “Joel? Just a minute, let me change. My lab coat is filthy.”

“Take your time, sir,” Joel called. “Where's the light switch, anyway?”

“There isn't one,” answered Forrester, dragging Frank to his cubicle and trying frantically to communicate via grimaces and hand gestures that Frank should hide behind the partition. Amazingly, Frank understood. “It's always dim like this down here.”

“Oh,” said Joel. “Listen, I heard about what happened at Arby's the other day, and I came to talk to you about it. Is now a good time?”

 _Uh-oh._ Forrester leaned around the cubicle, caught Frank's eye, and pantomimed bludgeoning someone with a big club. Frank shrank away. Forrester rolled his eyes and pointed in Joel's direction.

“I'll just come back another time, sir,” said Joel.

“No no!” cried Forrester. “Please, come in. Just follow my voice; it's all one big room.”

Forrester heard the elevator doors slide shut. They would not open again from this side. He sat on his bed: Joel would have to come to him, and from here the partitions would block his view of Frank's hiding place.

Joel's footsteps resolved themselves into a silhouette, then into Joel's entirely too earnest countenance. Forrester motioned Joel into the cube, where the janitor leaned against the door frame. “So, we need to talk about the Invention Exchange,” said Joel. Forrester tried to frame an apology, or at least an acknowledgment of guilt, but before he could find the words, Joel continued: “I'm sorry about what happened.”

Forrester raised his eyebrow at that. “ _You're_ sorry?” he said. “I mean – I should hope you're sorry! Because of you I'm going to spend the rest of my scientific career in a literal and figurative oubliette. What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I'm not sure what an oubliette is, sir,” said Joel, “but I think I get your drift. I need to apologize to you for not telling Dr. Noyes about our inventions getting mixed up. I was afraid she'd deep-six me if she knew the invention was mine.”

“Of course,” agreed Forrester, nodding furiously. “Our inventions got mixed up. You were the one who tried to raise the dead, not me.”

“The thing about that, sir,” said Joel, “is that I didn't mean to raise the dead. My invention was just an electric joy buzzer. A little gerbil would charge it up by running on the wheel, and then you'd use the buzzer part to shock someone, and you'd brighten their day.”

Forrester blinked twice. “You'd brighten their day.”

“Exactly,” said Joel. “I definitely didn't know it could raise gerbils from the dead. The gerbil wasn't even supposed to be dead. It just ate some spoiled food from the cafeteria.”

“Let me see if I understand,” said Forrester, raising himself to his full height. “You made a machine that could raise the dead _by accident._ Our inventions got switched, and you let Noyes deep-six _me_ over your brainless mistake.”

“Well, you did try to take credit for my invention, sir,” replied Joel affably. “So making it right wasn't at the top of my to-do list. But then I heard the other researchers talking about how you were crying into a turkey sandwich at Arby's...”

Forrester hoped that the dark obscured his face as he flushed red. Where was Frank? From the cubicle, there was no way to look for him.

“Anyways, I realized I didn't know how bad you had it,” continued Joel. “So I've decided to go to Dr. Noyes. I'm going to tell her what happened, how your invention is really my invention, but I didn't mean for my invention to do what it does. That way all the misunderstandings are cleared up and no one has to get deep-sixed. Okay?”

For a moment, an emotion like hope or vindication fluttered like a butterfly in Forrester's chest. They would see – they would all see what a mistake they'd made by sending him down here. They'd see that they'd misjudged him. He could show them the new inventions he'd made. They might even promote him to lead researcher. And Frank –

A cold hand clamped down on the nascent butterfly and pinioned its wings. Frank existed because of the Galatea. If the Galatea was Joel's invention, then Frank belonged to Joel. If Joel told Noyes the truth, Forrester would have his career back, but he would never see Frank again. Forrester could almost see it: Frank, trapped in some laboratory at Gizmonic Institute, being poked and shocked and unstitched by Joel, or some other scientist. A scientist who Frank didn't even matter to.

As if conjured by Forrester's imagination, Frank appeared behind Joel. He was holding a heavy pair of hedge trimmers at least half as tall as Frank was. Forrester recognized them from one of Erhardt's projects. Frank lifted the shears above Joel's head and looked at Forrester mutely, his eyes wide.

Forrester held his hands over his head and brought them down in front of him forcefully.

“Sir?” said Joel.

Frank brought down the shears.

\- - -

“Just because I have a rocket,” said Erhardt petulantly, “doesn't mean you can use it to bail yourself out. I told you that if your monster made a mess, it was your problem.”

“Joel's blood is on your shears,” Forrester bellowed. “What do you think they'll believe, some cockamamie story about a test dummy come to life, or my story about how crazy Larry Erhardt lost his mind again?”

“I could also take responsibility,” said Frank.

“Shut up, Frank,” said Forrester.

“Yes, sir.”

“You don't have much time to decide, Erhardt,” continued Forrester. “They could come looking for Joel at any moment. And when they arrive, I'll point them straight at you.”

Erhardt shook his head vigorously. “Do you have any idea how long it took to build that satellite from the scrap they toss us? I'd rather take my chances with the top brass than use the satellite without a bona fide research purpose.”

Dr. Forrester scowled. “And if there were a research purpose?”

Erhardt hesitated. “Will there be monkeys?”

“Joel looks kind of like a monkey,” said Forrester.

“Good enough,” said Erhardt. “Fill me in on the details later. This experiment is officially my project, but I'm giving you the satellite, and the payload you put on it is your business. Name the satellite whatever you want.”

“What are you going to name it, sir?” asked Frank.

“Oh, I don't know, Frank,” said Forrester irritably. “I'll think of something. Go get Joel, he should still be tied up on the bed. We need to take him to the satellite.”

\- - -

Forrester had expected a close call. You shouldn't be able to just waltz in and out of a secure facility pushing a bound and gagged janitor around, right? But it was Sunday and security was light. He'd managed to smuggle both Frank and Joel to Erhardt's launchpad secreted in the mountains behind Gizmonic Institute. Joel was on board the satellite, which sat atop the rocket like a Christmas ornament. He'd slip his bonds eventually, of course, but by then he'd be in orbit, and Forrester could do with him as he liked. He beamed with anticipation. Who would have thought that Joel's comeuppance would be so literal?

“Cross-check complete,” came Erhardt's voice over the intercom. “You may launch when ready.”

Forrester cast a fond eye on his monster, who regarded him rapturously in the cool glow of the control panel. At last, the Earth really was where it ought to be.

“Push the button, Frank,” he said.


End file.
